Philosophical
Dialogues XXX
By Franz J. T. Lee
January 25, 2000
Literature, Drama,
Poetry, B e a u t y & Mind Control
Part One: D R A M A: Bertholt Brecht, Kurt Weill & Lotte Lenya
Patricia: We are very happy to have a
discussion on Aesthetics and Mind Control, with special reference to Beauty,
Literature and Poetry. Let's begin somewhere, with Drama.
Let's salute Bert Brecht! I suggest that
we dedicate today's seminar to Brecht.
A master(mistress)piece, which I love to read is his
"Threepenny Opera".
Mahatma: Of course, romance and romantic things fall within the ambit of my philosophical compendium, but I'm a layman in literature, drama, opera and poetry. Could you please introduce me into these aesthetic pastures?
Patricia: Mahatma, according to my experience, I'm not quite so sure, that you really lack romantic encouragement or expertise. Nonetheless, let's look at Bertholt Brecht's method of writing. His bourgeois enemies, who loved copyrights, and who were copy-cats, accused him of piracy, shameless robbery and plagiarism; his socialist friends spoke about originality, re-writing and adaptation. Brecht simply took anything from anywhere and used it for human emancipatory purposes. He took his models and characters where he found them, from Shakespeare, from Marlowe, Kipling or Gorky, and he transformed them, according to his own whims, into his very own artistic crew.
Mahatma: What has his method got to do with the "Threepenny Opera"?
Patricia: Brecht based his opera on John Gay's "Beggar's Opera". Brecht was amused by the beggars, pimps and prostitutes in this play, especially by their living conditions, their poverty and misery in eighteenth-century London, that did not as yet experience the Industrial Revolution. This play was simply fresh, icy water to Brecht's boiling, poetic mills. Immediately, he and Kurt Weill got down to serious artistic "business". However, at first, I suggest that our experts introduce us to Brecht, Kurt and Lotte.
Jeanette: Who was John Gay? Could anybody give us a brief introduction to his dramatic well-being?
Coseino: This English poet and dramatist was born on June 30, 1685, in Barnstaple, Devon, England. He died in London, on December 4, 1732. His major work was the "The Beggar's Opera", distinguished by satire and "good humour". He belonged to the ancient impoverished Devonshire family. From 1712 to 1714 he jobbed as a steward in the household of the Duchess of Monmouth; there he had leisure and peace to write. In 1713, he published his first important poem, Rural Sports.
Let me just tell you about his finest poem, Trivia: The Art of Walking the Streets of London.
The poem portrays precise rhythm and diction,
which reflect every facet of experience which Gay illustrates. For example,
a sophisticated beautiful lady crosses the street:
" Her shoe disdains
the street: the lady fair
With narrow step affects a limping air."
This couplet precisely describes the experience,
artistically portraying it. Another example, this is how he describes the
coming of Spring, it's presence being felt throughout Nature:
"The seasons
operate on every breast:
'Tis hence that fawns are brisk,
and ladies drest."
Here the poetic effect is at once satirical, lively, even philosophical.
Martina: Beautiful! Tell us something about his opera, please.
Coseino: The theatre manager, John Rich, presented The Beggar's Opera in London on January 29, 1728. At Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, this opera ran for 62 performances, the longest run then known. Basically it's a simple and nice story about thieves and highway robbers. In general, the real motif was to illustrate the moral decadence of British society; in particular, to caricature the Whig administration of Sir Robert Walpole. Apart from this, it made fun about the Italian opera.
The play was especially stageworthy because of its "singable" songs. Its sequel, Polly, was banned by Lord Chamberlain. This, however, made excellent advertisement; and the edited version sold like "hot arepas", enriching its author with more than 1000 pounds sterling profit.
However, only Gay's Beggar's Opera was successfully transmitted into the 20th century, to 1928, as re-produced by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill, as the famous The Threepenny Opera, as Die Dreigroschenoper.
Alfred: I feel that we should also introduce Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht before we continue with our dramatic deliberations. Do you mind, Patricia?
Patricia: Not at all! All the better for me, to discuss the Dreigroschenoper later.
Coseino: Excellent! Alfred, give us a short introduction into the life and works of Brecht.
Alfred: I'll see what little I can offer. Bertholt or Bertholt Brecht was born on February 10, 1898 in Augsburg, Germany, and he died in East Berlin on August 14, 1956.
Coseino: As far
as I can remember, his original name was:
EUGEN BERTHOLD FRIEDRICH BRECHT.
Alfred: Thanks. Referring to our central topic, the German poet, playwright and performer, Brecht departs from the usual theatrical illusions, from ideological Mind Control, and he transformed drama into a social forum for emancipatory causes. For the time being, we will not take into account the fact that he wanted to change capitalist society from within, and that he formed a radical part of the Negation within the Contemporary World System itself.
Martina: Tell us about his works, please.
Alfred: Between 1917 and 1921, he studied Medicine in Munich, Bavaria, and served in an army hospital. After 1922, he produced his first plays, Baal and Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night); later, he wrote poems and songs, known as Die Hauspostille (A Manual of Piety); then followed his professional work, Edward II.
Max: What kind of attitude did Brecht then have towards contemporary bourgeois society?
Alfred: In one word, he had a "violent" attitude! It was born from the brutal, violent experience of the First World War, and because his fertile anticipating mind was already sensing the coming beastliness of Fascism and Nazism. He was deeply disappointed in European "Culture and Civilization". In the late 1920s, Karl Korsch had introduced Brecht to the fundamentals of Marxism.
And now to link up with Patricia again: together with the composer Kurt Weill, Brecht wrote the satirical, successful ballad opera Die Dreigroschenoper. Later the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930; Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) followed. Also: "Lehrstücke" ("exemplary plays"). Of importance to note is, that from then onwards, Brecht became a Marxist.
Terrorized by the Nazis, after 1933, Brecht had to go into exile. Here I have a short resume from the Encyclopaedia Britannica that explains briefly his life and works between 1933 and 1949, which I'll read to you now:
"In 1933 he went into exile--in Scandinavia (1933-41), mainly in Denmark, and then in the United States (1941-47), where he did some film work in Hollywood. In Germany his books were burned and his citizenship was withdrawn. He was cut off from the German theatre; but between 1937 and 1941 he wrote most of his great plays, his major theoretical essays and dialogues, and many of the poems collected as Svendborger Gedichte (1939). The plays of these years became famous in the author's own and other productions: notable among them are Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her Children), a chronicle play of the Thirty Years' War; Leben des Galilei (1943; The Life of Galileo); Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan), a parable play set in pre-war China; Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1957; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), a parable play of Hitler's rise to power set in pre-war Chicago; Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1948; Herr Puntila and His Man Matti), a Volksstück (popular play) about a Finnish farmer who oscillates between churlish sobriety and drunken good humour; and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (first produced in English, 1948; Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1949), the story of a struggle for possession of a child between its highborn mother, who deserts it, and the servant girl who looks after it.
Brecht left the United States in 1947 after having had to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He spent a year in Zürich, working mainly on Antigone-Modell 1948 (adapted from Hölderlin's translation of Sophocles; produced 1948) and on his most important theoretical work, the Kleines Organon für das Theater (1949; "A Little Organum for the Theatre"). "
Karl: Could anybody tell us something about the essence of his theory of drama? I could imagine that for Brecht an emancipatory drama cannot affirm the Aristotelian premise, that the audience should live in a world of "make-believe", that they should believe, that what they are seeing on the stage is really happening hic et nunc! This model is the easiest and fastest way to control the minds of the audience, and to inculcate ideology into their very souls. So what did the Antigone-Modell, the "Little Organum", imply?
Alfred: Karl, exactly that what you anticipate! Brecht did not want his audience to identify their current emotions with those of King Lear, Hamlet, Galileo or Oedipus, simply because this would imply a static heresy against Heracleitus' "Everything flows" or a reactionary blasphemy against the ever-changing Marxian "class struggle". Brilliantly, the Encyclopaedia Britannica summarizes this idea:
"Brecht therefore argued that the theatre should
not seek to make its audience
believe in the presence of the characters on the stage--should not make
it identify with them, but should rather follow the method of the epic poet's
art, which is to make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage
is merely an account of past events that it should watch with critical detachment.
Hence, the "epic" (narrative, nondramatic) theatre is based on detachment,
on the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), achieved through
a number of devices that remind the spectator that he is being presented
with a demonstration of human behaviour in scientific spirit rather than
with an illusion of reality, in short, that the theatre is only a theatre
and not the world itself. "
Coseino: Let me give your brilliant expose a rather curious final touch. In 1949, Brecht settled in East Berlin, and founded his own theatre, the Berliner Ensemble, there, with his wife, Helene Weigel, in the main role, he staged Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. Of course, within the context of the "Cold War", the West boycotted him, and the East praised him. After a great victory at the Paris Théâtre des Nations in 1955, in Moscow, Brecht even received the Stalin Peace Prize. Even Brecht was abused for Stalinist Mind Control tactics. Soon thereafter, Brecht died of a heart attack in East Berlin.
Now, let me rapidly give you some basic information about Brecht's co-worker, Kurt Julian Weill. He was born on March 2, 1900, in Dessau, Germany, and he died on April 3, 1950, in New York, N.Y., United States. As opera composer, his early music in character was very expressionistic, experimental, and abstract.
In Mahagonny, he collaborated with Brecht, and this "Singspiel" or song-play was a great success. For Die Dreigroschenoper, Weill wrote the music and Brecht provided the libretto. Later, Patricia will tell us more. Weill's wife, the actress Lotte Lenya, sang for the first time in Mahagonny (1927) and it became a great success, thereafter she performed in Die Dreigroschenoper. As was the case to so many other brilliant thinkers, Weill's political and musical ideas and his Jewish birth were not loved at all by Nazi Germany, and he was declared as persona non grata by the Nazis. He fled Berlin, left for Paris and eventually landed in the European "haven of all unwanted", in London. Until after World War II, his music was banned in Germany.
Indira: Not to make this artistic field totally a man's world, please tell us more about the famous actress, Lotte Lenya.
Coseino: Fine. Here is a brief summary, based on the few essential data available.
Lotte Lenya, original name, KAROLINE BLAMAUER, was born on October 18, 1900, Penzing, Austria, and she died on November 27, 1981 in New York City. In Zurich, between 1914 and 1920, she studied ballet and drama, and later played roles in Shakespearean dramas in Berlin.
In 1926, she married Weill, divorced him in 1933, but remarried him again in 1937 in New York City, where he resumed his career. What specifically interests us, is that she alternated in the roles of Jenny and Lucy in Die Dreigroschenoper.
Fleeing the Nazis, in Paris, in 1933, she played in Die sieben Todsünden ( "The Seven Deadly Sins"), a ballet-drama, written by Weill and Brecht. In New York, she made her debut as Miriam in The Eternal Road (1937); in 1944, she played the role of Cissy in Candle in the Wind; and, in the year thereafter, she played the duchess in The Firebrand of Florence.
After Weill's death, in 1951, she played the
Socratic Xantippe in Barefoot in Athens; later she featured in many re-plays,
including the famous Dreigroschenoper. Because she lived more than 80 years,
she had an extensive artistic life. Among other things, she played roles
in several films, among them:
Die Dreigroschenoper (1930),
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1960),
From Russia with Love (1964), and
The Appointment (1969).
For her acting in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, in the following year, she was even nominated for an Academy Award. She appeared in many TV programmes and performed in various international concerts.
Karl: As a matter of interest, talking about the film industry, what was the situation in Germany during the 30s?
Coseino: Well, Karl, talking about beauties
and angels, there happened things that especially would interest you. The
German film industry owned the Tobis-Klangfilm patents and could produce
important films already at the beginning of the 1930s:
Sternberg's Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930);
Pabst's two antiwar films, Westfront 1918 (1930)
and
Kameradschaft (1931),
and his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's
Die Dreigroschenoper (1931).
Alfred: However, the most important success of the German Film Industry was Lang's M (1931). It used a dimension of aural imagery to counterpoint its visuals, somehow like Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail. M made expressive use of nonnaturalistic sounds.
Karl: I saw this movie way back in the 60s. Can you give us an example of these nonnaturalistic sounds?
Alfred: For example, when the child murderer (acted by Peter Lorre) always is heard towhistle a certain recurring theme from Grieg's Peer Gynt, just before committing his crimes offscreen. I often use modern versions of these film techniques in my own movies.
Coseino: Ladies & Gentlemen, our time is up! Next week we continue with Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Enjoy the afternoon and please, Take Care!
(Looking towards the future, Coseino remembers Brecht's
didactic poem:
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